A man came hurriedly out of the tent: no military officer, but a gentleman in a neat sombre suit of dark brown. ‘General, if you will forgive me, the Ministry feels there is some danger of a precedent—if I might have a word—’ He had not properly, fully, taken in Temeraire yet. While he talked he caught glimpses of black scales, the smooth horn of the talons: impressions which over the course of his sentence accumulated until at last he raised his head and fell silent.

‘No, you mightn't,’ Wellesley said with satisfaction, watching him choke, and pressed him unresistingly into a folding-chair. ‘Have a seat, Giles. Rowley, go on and tell the rest of them to come out here at once.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ Temeraire said to the poor man who trembled violently as Temeraire's head lowered, ‘but if you are part of the Ministry, I should like a word, myself. We would like to vote, please, and also to be paid.’

The professional soldiers were not quite so easily quelled. Jane dispelled a great deal of the effect by coming out and saying to Temeraire, ‘Did you deck yourself out for Christmas? This is a war, not a Vauxhall burlesque.’

‘I have put on my nicest things, to be respectful,’ Temeraire said, injured.

‘To show away, you mean,’ Jane said, and as this mode of conversation did not result in her being eaten, or squashed, the others grew bolder. More bold than Wellesley would have liked; he had evidently hit on the notion of stifling dissent for his own proposals through intimidation by proxy, rather than possessing any real interest in Temeraire's opinion.

The threat they faced was no longer the subject of disagreement; scouts and word along the road had brought enough intelligence for that. The Fleur-de-Nuits would come, two formations’ worth of them, likely near the middle of the night; and would bombard them steadily until morning when the massed French lines would fall upon them and try to drive them from their position.

Their position was indeed an enviable one: the generals had retreated from the coast to reserve for themselves the luxury of choosing the next battlefield. That Napoleon would seek to occupy London, had never been in doubt. He had occupied Vienna, though that city lacked strategic value, and marched through Berlin, only for the moral value of these victories, the personal and not the military satisfaction of standing in his enemies' palaces and feeling them his own. And London had a great many banks. Gold and silver to fuel his invasion, and the chance to split the country south from north, with the Thames as a useful vein bringing him lifeblood from the coast.